1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to tobacco harvesters and more specifically to a two-row tobacco harvester adapted to be pulled by a single tractor and having means for adjusting the height of the harvester as well as a unique defoliating and conveying arrangement for the tobacco leaves from the tobacco plants to a trailer.
2. Prior Art
For many years the harvesting of tobacco has been a manual operation. Tobacco has been harvested at a particular time in the growing season and the leaves of the plant ripen at different times. The leaves ripen progressively from the bottom to the top of the stock thereby necessitating five or six successive passes through the field to remove the ripened leaves. Such manual harvesting methods require a great deal of man power which has become increasingly scarce and more expensive in recent years.
The first type of mechanical tobacco harvester consisted primarily of a frame upon which the leaf primers would ride through the field as they manually removed the leaves.
In recent years various other types of mechanical tobacco harvesters were developed wherein the harvester would straddle a single row of tobacco plants in a rotating defoliator which stripped the lower leaves from the plant onto a conveyor mechanism for transfer to a suitable receptacle. The majority of these mechanical tobacco harvesters which carry out a priming operation are self-propelled and straddle one row of tobacco at a time. Other types of tobacco harvesters are adapted to be rigidly mounted on the side of a tractor but this type of tobacco harvester can only be utilized where the entire tobacco plant is cut and stripped since it is impossible to effectively operate on any row of tobacco except the one closest to the tractor. Generally tobacco fields are planted with every fifth row missing to allow for the passage of tractors and trailers through the field. Thus the tractor mounted units would be unable to harvest the middle rows of each group of four rows without first cutting down the outermost rows.
Pull type tobacco harvesters have also been developed which can be adjusted for movement behind the tractor so as to straddle either one of the first two rows closest to the fifth middle. In this way all four rows of tobacco can be harvested while the tractor remains in the fifth middle. Such harvesters generally have first and second defoliator means located on opposite sides of a row of tobacco which are mounted in a subframe for lateral movement relative to the main frame of the tobacco harvester to accommodate minor variations in row alignment. A plurality of rotatable rollers are mounted between each defoliator means in the subframe for laterally transferring the harvested leaves onto longitudinally moving conveyors mounted at each side of the main frame. The harvester is provided with substantially vertically disposed conveyor means for transferring the leaves upwardly to transversely dispose conveyor means which will deposit the leaves into a receptacle on a trailer movable along side the harvester.